kaya217's review
4.0
I liked this book. Funny stories. She seems like someone I could kick back and have a mocktail with.
rachels_booknook's review
3.0
This is Gabrielle Union’s second memoir. This memoir, like her first, was more of a book of essays or short stories. Gabrielle Union says about this book, “I promise to continue to make you laugh, but with this round, the stakes get higher as the conversation goes deeper.” While I did like her first book better, she was definitely very honest about her life in both books, and I was also impressed at how many details she remembers from specific moments and stories. And wow does she have a lot of stories.
There were some chapters I really enjoyed – specifically the chapters about her experience with infertility, her stepdaughter Zaya’s coming out as gay and then transgender, and the things she would have done differently for her character in Bring It On. This book definitely made me think more about some of the topics she was discussing. She talks about racisim in so many different areas – in infertility, in Hollywood, in international travel and more. It was definitely the common theme running through her stories. And while I appreciated that and learned from it, sometimes her stories seemed a bit disjointed and kind of all over the place, but somehow at the same time kind of repetitive. She also talked a lot about celebrity parties, her life as a famous basketball player’s wife and other experiences that I just didn’t connect with. While I don’t want to diminish someone’s telling of their own memoir, sometimes I questioned why certain chapters had been included.
I want to acknowledge that a lot of the information and lessons that she’s trying to impart to her readers is definitely important, but that due to the reasons above I also found this book harder to follow than her first.